Matthews on Marketing

Matthews on Marketing

Marketingspeak: What is Pretargeting?

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It wasn't too long ago that marketers were learning about retargeting. Now there's a new sibling in the advertising family named 'pretargeting'. So what's the diff? Pretargeting is an online advertising technique where marketers target individual buyers based on profile, past behavior or both. It's pre- and not re- because your ads get shown before your targets have ever been to your website. To my mind, pretargeting is a refinement of the age old advertising demographic; it is much more … [Read more...]

Next-Step Marketing

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I’m a big fan of the buyer journey. It’s one of the most powerful marketing tools available. I’m also a big funnel geek and spend a lot of time counting leads and tweaking conversion rates. The buyer journey and the funnel are essentially the same idea – mapping the process a prospective buyer takes before becoming a customer. Understand how sales happen, and you can scale your business. Otherwise, you are merely hoping, which is not a strategy. Despite the power (not to mention the stress … [Read more...]

How to Hire Great Inbound Marketers: Six Key Personality Traits

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Note: I originally published this post on LinkedIn. Inbound marketing requires certain skills – skills you may not have in your department. As it becomes an ever-larger part of the marketing mix, finding people who are good at inbound is going to become more important. But as buzzy as inbound marketing is, finding people who are good at it is not easy. How can that be? After all, it’s not like inbound was invented yesterday. The term ‘inbound marketing’ was coined by Hubspot’s Brian … [Read more...]

How to Fund a Channel Partner Program

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Though channel partners can buy products at discounted rates, vendors still need to invest to help them generate demand. There are three basic models for funding channel partner programs: market development funds, contra-revenue funds, and co-op funds. These are distinctive models, but businesspeople commonly confuse them. Therefore, you should be careful to specify to the partner exactly what kind of funding your company offers. Market development funds (MDF) are distributed to partners in … [Read more...]

Marketingspeak: Why Are PR People Called ‘Flacks’?

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PR people have a hard job. Clients are never happy. Their story should have gotten more coverage. It was the agency's fault for not pushing hard enough. The agency can't easily tell their client that their story was a dud. Reporters see agencies as a necessary evil. PR staffers bring them stories, but can also be pushy. And truth be told, most reporters prefer finding their own stories. So it's no wonder PR pros have earned the pejorative 'flack,' as in "Tell that PR flack to stop … [Read more...]